I was recently featured with 8 other entrepreneurs in InformationWeek's (May 2012 issue) cover story on cloud startups in India. You can read this issue online via issuu.

Cloud/SaaS is hot in India and here to stay. Why wouldn't anyone want to run their business using a group of SaaS apps and pay a monthly subscription? Why would you ever install sofware when it is available online? 

 

If a picture is worth a thousand words, then a video is worth a million. Videos are the best way to learn about something - you can sit back, grab a beer, relax and watch. So much better than reading FAQs and help docs. So, why not just spin out videos for every feature for your software product? That is exactly what we did in 2009 using Camtasia Studio. With changes in features and the user interface, we had to revamp our videos again this year. The process was long but fun and depended on multiple people working from remote locations.

Screencasting

I am a die-hard Apple fan and so I decided that we would do this batch of screencasting on a Mac using ScreenFlow by Telestream - one of the best screencasting software in the world! It is so worth $99. Swati, our support ninja, learnt how to record and edit videos in a few days and started to revamp the 35 videos doing a few a day. She would save the recorded ScreenFlow files to a shared DropBox folder in 3 batches. I would check these videos and give her the go-ahead if they seemed ok.

Transcripts

Luckily, I had saved all the old video transcripts in Google Docs. Writing new transcripts from scratch is a lot of work. Unless a feature had changed we just re-used the earlier content with a few minor changes. I created 3 transcript files each having 12, 12, 11 transcripts.

Narration

I wanted the narration to be done by someone who is a professional voice-over artist. I spoke to a few people in Mumbai, but they were exorbitantly expensive. I really didn’t care where the narration was done from as long as it was cost effective and good quality.

I put up a project on oDesk and waited a few days for people to apply. I shortlisted 7 voice-over artists and even asked them to record a few lines and send me the mp3 files. Within a couple of days, I hired Natalie. She was amazing to work with - none of the 35 videos had to be redone and she promptly replied to all my messages.

Every time Natalie would complete a batch of narration, I would listen to the audio to make sure it sounded clear. I then shared the mp3 files with Swati who then embedded the audio track within the ScreenFlow videos. ScreenFlow is so flexible that it even lets you split, remove and move around audio tracks.

I love the fact that the world is getting so small that we don’t need to be in the same city to hire professionals to get work done. The Internet has opened up infinite possibilities. There is no reason to not find and work with good talent.

Music Loops

I decided to experiment with embedding some background music when Natalie wasn’t talking during the video playback. Luckily, GarageBand already had music loops that you can export out as a mp3 file. I chose a few upbeat loops and asked Swati to embed them into the videos via ScreenFlow.

HD YouTube

The final step was to recheck the videos and give Swati the go-ahead to export them into a YouTube format that supported High Definition (HD). We referred to this article to help export the ScreenFlow videos to HD quality.

I also asked her to upload transcripts to all the YouTube videos to improve SEO.

That is it. Last week we uploaded the 35th video and updated our site and application to point to these new videos.

What we learnt...

As a startup you can take control of everything. If we had to do this 10 years ago, we might have burnt a hole in our pockets. It is different today. Software is ubiquitous, inexpensive and powerful. You can work with talent from across the world. There are zero-barriers to getting things done. What more does a startup want?

Power to all of us.

Last month we rewamped the DeskAway website using responsive web design with the help of Skeleton. Skeleton is a small collection of CSS & Javascript files that can help you rapidly develop sites that look beautiful at any size, be it a 17" laptop screen or an iPhone. We got rid of tables and cleaned up a lot of legacy code that was tagging on the old site since 2007.

Next up, we ran several tests on the homepage (our most popular landing page) using Pingdom and GTmetrix. Here is what Pingdom showed us on March 27th…

Load time: 6.41 seconds | Page size: 666.3 kB |  Requests: 71

Ouch! These numbers will not only jeopardize signups but we might also not do well on Google rankings since Google does pay attention to page load time. Even if the design is good the page needs to load quickly.

We went to work on the homepage on March 28th.

Today, the results on the same page look different :)

As we continued to improve the homepage we ran several tests over the last few weeks to learn about what changes impact the load time the most.

Since, we have our website under version control, it made it easier to switch branches and compared how we improved over our current version. We created a seperate branch in git and started work on optimizing the website. This ensured that the Master branch remained available for any hot fixes that may arise.

Our pages were already compressed using GZip when requested (this is something Apache does) so this is something we didn’t change (this is very important if you want to serve your site faster).

Here is some stuff that we worked on…

• Change individual images to image sprites. What this means is that instead of loading each image using an img tag, you group all images in an image file (so you only need to load one image file) and then call each image using CSS. This is a great way to reduce http requests if you have a lot of images (banners, icons etc.) on the page. As an example, here is what the sprite image would look like. Once you have your image sprite you can use Sprite Cow to generate CSS for your image sprite.

  However, we did not include the following images within the image sprite:

  Customer Testimonials - as they will change over time and it is easier to update them from the page than change the image sprite every time.

  DeskAway logo - since the logo is a part of the content of the site we decided to leave it in the image tag. This StackOverflow article was helpful - Is using the logo tag in sprites good or bad?

• Use Yahoo’s Smush.it to optimize images without causing any change to the visual quality of the image.

• Remove unused CSS in all our CSS files. A cleanup is always good when you are done designing your site.

• Make sure you define a width and a height for all images on your webpage. This helps save time since the browser doesn’t have to do the work of calculating the dimensions.

• Minify all javascript files. This means that you are compressing your javascript files to remove any white space (which takes up some file space). Minimus is nice little minify utility for OS X. Just drag and drop your Javascript files to have them minified.

• Defer parsing of Javascript till to the end of the page. Puting Javascript in the footer so the page loads faster. What we did notice is that the Typekit fonts take over the default font till the page is completely loaded. So for a while, the user’s see the headings in Times New Roman. We moved the Typekit Javascript code back to the header so the user doesn’t see a change in the font family (that would be a crappy user experience).

• Remove Twitter embed code from the page. We had posted a customer tweet using the Twitter embed code. However, the page was also loading some Twitter Javascript for this one embed. We decided it was not worth it and changed the embed to an image and linked it up to the tweet.

• Remove Facebook like and Twitter tweet buttons from the footer. These buttons come with their own baggage and we really didn’t think it was worth having them on the front page. If either of these API’s become slow (or go down) it would impact the way our page would load.

• Remove the SnapEnage widget for the home page. Just like the Twitter and Facebook buttons this widget was creating an additional overhead on the page. 

The next few weeks we will wait and watch to see if a faster homepage generates more signups or reduces the bounce rate altogether.

Hope this was helpful. Good luck with optimizing your webpage!

I came across an interesting article in Forbes on managing distractions and not checking email obsessively. Click on the image and see if you should check your email :)

 

pManifold Business Solutions is an information and advisory services startup. They work on large and small assignments ranging from business transformation to business development projects for their clients. Their projects include research, consulting and stakeholder engagement. 

Faiz Wahid, Director of pManifold Business Solutions shared his views on how he uses DeskAway... 

How are you using DeskAway and what value is it providing your team? Were you using any other tool or method before DeskAway?

DeskAway is very useful for task assignments and capturing our approach in solving our client's problems. As all projects we do are very different from one another, DeskAway approach to make task lists allows us to structure our approach and keep track of the project's progress at any point in time. 

For our individual team members it helps to keep focused on their assigned tasks while the dynamism of new and upcoming projects continues around them. 

For project leads and partners in the company it helps to get the big picture and followup with team members in a more structured manner. 

We were not using any specific tool (except XLS) for project management prior to adopting DeskAway. We did try a few others but DeskAway was more simple to work with. 

Can you give a specific incident or example when DeskAway was really useful when managing or getting a project completed?

We were working on organization structuring of a large (3000+ people) company across India with multiple project offices, site offices and their head quarters. We had to interview almost 200+ people and you can imagine how difficult such things can get to track. DeskAway helped us keep track of the big picture and stay focused on our scope and timelines.

Was there a learning curve associated with DeskAway? How did your team adapt to a new application?

The learning curve is pretty low and smooth. The team adapted to the major parts of the application pretty easily.

What features does your team use the most?

DeskMail and daily work plan are probably the most widely used.

Are you emailing (sending tasks, attachments etc.) less because of DeskAway?

Yes we are. In fact that is one of the main purpose of using DeskAway.

How has DeskAway helped in lowering project costs, profitability or improving efficiency?

We have not yet gone to the level of measuring project costs and profitability. However we do have improvements in efficiency and accountability.

For example, the turnaround time and reporting of task progress and completion has jumped manifolds. 

Are there any other thoughts that you would want to share with us regarding our service, product etc.? 

The tool is very well priced and packed with useful features. 

Thanks Faiz and good luck with your business! 

If you are using DeskAway and would like to get featured, please drop us a note and we will get in touch with you.